Microsoft’s error messages may have been rather cryptic and full of techno-babble in the past, but you could at least find a Knowledge Base article based on the message and get a good handle on what’s going on. “Something happened” is still cryptic with the added detriment of being completely useless. Unfortunate, too, because Windows 10 — if it installs, anyway — is a really strong OS, as strong as Windows has been in recent years.

I’m writing this in Safari, the genesis of the WebKit project, while listening to music on Spotify, a WebKit-based music player. On my other monitor is GitHub’s Atom, a really damned fine programmers’ editor that has its roots in WebKit (to the point where you can inspect it and change the UI with stylesheets).

Just imagine if Microsoft had continued to actively develop, and perhaps even open-source, Trident (the IE rendering engine) in the early 2000s. (On second thought…best to just leave that alone.)

Unfortunately, for a couple days it looks like none of you were able to get your fix of largely outdated blog posts. I’m not terribly sure why the pool for jaredwsmith.com was trying to allocate a metric crap-ton of memory, but I’ve got it all fixed and running some newer stuff as well, including a rather nice upgrade from Linode (for free!) that will help me do some more interesting number-crunching on weather data.

Six Colors, Jason Snell’s (formerly of Macworld) new site, is powered by Movable Type. I worked daily on Movable Type when I was at ReadWriteWeb. Despite how I would tend to curse some of its quirks, I grew to be quite fond of several of its features and implementations, notably its publishing to static files, its flexibility in setting up a publishing queue (may TheSchwartz be with you) and how it handles multiple blogs (something MT still blows WordPress away at).

Long-time readers will know of my affinity for the music played on the Weather Channel’s Local on the 8s until its relaunch earlier this year. I’ve been slowly curating a Spotify playlist with many of the songs played over the years on The Weather Channel; it is remarkable just how much is out there.

This playlist wouldn’t be possible without great research by the people behind TWC Classics and TWC Today.

The other day, I upgraded my wife’s MacBook Air to OS X Yosemite. Immediately, her first concern was that the UI text was harder to read. This is, in part, due to Helvetica Neue replacing Lucida Grande, but also because Yosemite’s LCD font smoothing seems rather harsh on non-Retina. Fortunately, a Terminal command makes for a crisper and easier-to-read display:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

Log out and back in and you should see some improvement in text rendering in the Yosemite UI.